For many people (myself included) having at least some minimal (in my case, very minimal) presence is difficult to avoid. Many FB users are so accustomed to relying on FB that they will legitimately not use e-mail, texting, phone calls, etc. as a primary means of contact anymore.

To get your own data dump, head to your Facebook Settings and click on “Download a copy of your data” at the bottom of the page. Facebook needs a little time to compile all that information, but it should be ready in about 10 minutes based on my own experience. You’ll receive a notification sending you to a page where you can download the data—after re-entering your account password, of course.

The (likely huge) file downloads onto your computer as a ZIP. Once you extract it, open the new folder and click on the “index.html” to view the data in your browser.

Be sure to check out the Contact Info tab for a list of everyone you’ve ever known and their phone number (creepy, Facebook). You can also scroll down to the bottom of the Friends tab so see what phase of your life Facebook thinks you’re in —I got “Starting Adult Life.”

I did this and was appalled. Especially as I've had the application framework off for years and have made every effort to shield as much as I could short of actually deleting my account.

I can't imagine how much worse perusing this data dump would be for all the regular (or heavy) users out there.

"On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog... but everybody knows if you're a jackass."

One thing the data dump does not include (and it's significant) is a a bunch of separate data (including every search you've ever made on FB(!) that needs to be manually reviewed/curated via many links/pages .

Specifically, the search history is really well hidden, and you can't turn it off. You can only manually go in now and then and force it to clear out. My assumption is that this data is particularly useful in targeting ads to you, and they'd prefer you not clear it. Hence, it's buried under a few menus.

To review/clear any data, you first need to go to the activity log.

activity.JPG

You'll see a laundry list of items to review/revise on the left hand side, but it's not complete... Certain things are hidden by default.

activity2.JPG

You'll need to click the tiny "More" link in the above list to fully expand it. Your search history will now (finally) appear near the very bottom. Click the image to see a larger, more readable version.

activity3.JPG

What a joy it is to sift through all those options and individually curate each one!

You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.

"On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog... but everybody knows if you're a jackass."

Nice! This leverages some pre-existing (and somewhat new) tech called "containers" which work very well. Essentially, this sort of walls off facebook and doesn't let it set tracking cookies and track other websites. Highly recommend this to all firefox users.

"On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog... but everybody knows if you're a jackass."